New Light on Gulf of Tonkin

By Captain Ronnie E. Ford, U.S. Army. 28 July, 1997

With fresh evidence now available, claims that the Tonkin Gulf
incident was deliberately provoked gain new plausibility.

The Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964 may rank with the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as
events that Dr. David Kaiser of the U.S. Naval War College describes
as "controversies in American political history that dwarf all
others."

The claim that the administration of President Lyndon Johnson
deliberately triggered the Vietnam War by orchestrating the Tonkin
Gulf incident and duping Congress is not a new one. Two recent
books--Sedgwick Tourison's Secret Army, Secret War (reviewed in the
February 1997 Vietnam) and Dr. Edwin Moise's Tonkin Gulf and the
Escalation of the Vietnam War--and other new revelations may indicate,
however, that the claim is certainly more plausible than could once be
proved. Thirty-three years after the fact, modern Tonkin Gulf
researchers pointedly ask: Did the United States intentionally
instigate the first attack on USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin on
August 2, 1964? Did Hanoi actually order a second attack on Maddox on
August 4, 1964? And, if the Communist Vietnamese did not launch this
second attack, then did Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara
knowingly and deliberately mislead the U.S. Congress to obtain support
for what would become the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, to ensure President
Johnson's re-election and ultimately lead the United States into war?

The story of former South Vietnamese special operation forces, part of
an American covert intelligence effort known as Operation Plan 34A (or
34 Alpha), is finally coming to light. Details about the plan are now
available, thanks to the release of once-classified documents and
disclosures by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and military
intelligence officials.

When Hanoi officially switched its reunification strategy to one of
armed conflict in 1960, the Communists, through infiltration, began to
build an organized regular force that threatened the American-backed
Saigon regime in South Vietnam. In 1961, hoping to undermine the
Communist Vietnamese government in Hanoi, the CIA initiated a joint
sea-land covert special operation with the South Vietnamese government
to dissuade Hanoi from its infiltration activities.

The CIASouth Vietnamese covert force conducted airborne, maritime and
overland agent-insertion operations. South Vietnamese covert
operatives were to gather intelligence, recruit support, establish
bases of resistance and carry out psychological operations behind
enemy lines. The maritime operation began as an infiltration
operation. But beginning in June 1962, with the loss of the vessel
Nautelas II and four commandos, it evolved into hit-and-run attacks
against North Vietnamese shore and island installations by South
Vietnamese and foreign mercenary crews on high-speed patrol boats.

While some infiltration operations had some initial successes, such
successes were few. The CIA suspected the North Vietnamese were
capturing and attempting to turn the agents immediately upon their
arrival. By the end of 1963, a National Security Council Special
Group, the staff of the special assistant for counterinsurgency and
special activities of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the
CIA were all apparently aware that the covert attacks were
unproductive. According to former Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara, "It accomplished virtually nothing." But the operation was
not discontinued. According to Tourison, by January 1964 McNamara had
taken over the operation from the CIA, and it became known as 34
Alpha. Now in charge, the Pentagon assumed that the overwhelming
majority of the airborne commando agents either had been killed or
captured or were working for their captors, the Communist North
Vietnamese.

Although it appeared that the program had been compromised, new agent
teams continued to be recruited, trained and inserted into North
Vietnam. By August 1968, approximately 500 of these men were presumed
lost. In his book, Tourison poses an interesting question: Were these
teams of commandos deliberately used initially to push Hanoi into war
and later to test U.S. communications security, or were they simply
victims of effective North Vietnamese counterintelligence operations?
The answer lies in the story behind what were known as the U.S. Navy's
DeSoto patrols.

DeSoto patrols were U.S. naval intelligence collection operations
using specially equipped vessels to gather electronic signals
intelligence from shore-and island-based noncommunications emitters in
North Vietnam. By August 2, 1964, the Communist Vietnamese had
determined that the DeSoto vessels were offshore support for a
34-Alpha operation that had struck their installations at Hon Me and
Hon Ngu some 48 hours earlier. In retaliation, the North Vietnamese
then conducted an "unprovoked attack" on Maddox, which was
approximately 30 miles off the coast of North Vietnam. During the
battle that ensued, one North Vietnamese patrol boat was severely
damaged by Maddox, and two others were attacked and chased off by U.S.
air support from the carrier USS Ticonderoga.

On August 4, 1964, Maddox and USS C. Turner Joy reported a second
attack, this one occurring within 17 hours of 34-Alpha raids on North
Vietnamese facilities at Cap Vinh Son and Cua Ron. On that day the
National Security Agency (NSA) had warned that an attack on Maddox
appeared imminent. An hour after the NSA's warning, Maddox claimed
that she had established radar contact with three or four unidentified
vessels approaching at high speed. Ticonderoga soon launched aircraft
to assist Maddox and C. Turner Joy. Low clouds and thunderstorms
reportedly made visibility very poor for the aircraft, and the pilots
never confirmed the presence of any North Vietnamese attackers. During
the next several hours, the ships reported more than 20 torpedo
attacks, the visual sighting of torpedo wakes, searchlight
illumination, automatic-weapons fire, and radar and sonar contact.

Despite the recommendation of Captain John J. Herrick, the recently
assigned senior officer on board Maddox, that the
circumstances--including darkness, stormy seas and nervous,
inexperienced crewmen--warranted a "thorough investigation," Secretary
of Defense McNamara told Congress there was "unequivocal proof" of the
second "unprovoked attack" on U.S. ships. Within hours of McNamara's
revelations, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and the
United States plunged into the only war it has ever lost.

McNamara's account, backed by the Johnson administration, did not go
unchallenged. Before a joint executive session of the Senate Foreign
Relations and Armed Services Committee debating full congressional
support for the resolution, Senator Wayne Morse (D-Ore.), who had
already dubbed the conflict "McNamara's War," declared: "I am
unalterably opposed to this course of action which, in my judgment, is
an aggressive course of action on the part of the United States. I
think you are kidding the world if you try to give the impression that
when the South Vietnamese naval boats bombarded two islands a short
distance off the coast of North Vietnam we were not implicated."
Senator Morse also noted that the American vessels were "conveniently
standing by" as support for 34-Alpha operations.

In response, McNamara denied any U.S. naval involvement in the South
Vietnamese-run operations, asserting that the DeSoto operations were
neither support nor cover for 34-Alpha raids. Tourison sets the record
straight on this issue. "The MarOps [maritime operations] were not
CIA-supported South Vietnamese operations that the United States had
no control over as former Secretary of Defense McNamara claimed,"
writes Tourison. "These operations were under U.S. control, not South
Vietnamese."

McNamara also claimed that the Maddox crew had no knowledge of the
34-Alpha raids. McNamara now acknowledges that this claim was untrue,
although he maintains that he did not know it at the time. Captain
Herrick and his crew did indeed know of the 34-Alpha operations. In
fact, retired Lt. Gen. Phillip B. Davidson, the former chief of
intelligence for the U.S. Army Military Assistance Command, Vietnam
(MACV), cites Captain Herrick's observation that Maddox personnel were
extremely concerned that the 34-Alpha operations were putting their
ship in harm's way. Davidson further endorses Herrick's assessment
that this concern may have resulted in an overly nervous crew and
unreliable reporting about the second attack in the gulf.

On August 7, 1964, the Senate passed support for Tonkin Gulf
Resolution 88-2, with Senators Morse and Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska)
voting nay. The House voted 4160 in support. Prophetically, Senator
Morse closed his argument by saying, "I believe that within the next
century, future generations will look with dismay and great
disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a
historic mistake."

The events surrounding the resolution and its passage point to a
tragic failure in the U.S. decision-making system of the time. At a
crucial moment in history, U.S. intelligence-collection agencies
directly fed raw intelligence data to U.S. policy-makers without
submitting that data to thorough and proper analysis. The prevalence
of this kind of unpolished intelligence support to government leaders
helped open the door to full U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

In 1972, Louis Tordella, the deputy director of the NSA, announced
that the decoded message on which the NSA's August 4 warning to Maddox
had been based actually referred to the original attack on August 2.
And the "unequivocal proof" of the second attack consisted of
decrypted North Vietnamese damage assessments of the first attack
(August 2) that were presented to top-level U.S. decision-makers as
the alleged second attack was being reported to the Pentagon.
According to a U.S. News and World Report exposi, former CIA Deputy
Director for Intelligence Ray S. Cline verified this series of
mistakes in 1984. Given the extreme volitality and pressure of the
situation, the fact that some decision-makers were confused by
intercepts suggesting two attacks is understandable. That they acted
so quickly on rash assumptions--removing the chance for necessary
debate and analysis--added insult to injury in an already untenable
decision climate.

In his book Vietnam at War, General Davidson points out that Herrick
was a combat veteran who realized that the Maddox crew had never
before been in combat. He claims that Captain Herrick's assessment
that the "entire action leaves many doubts except for apparent attempt
to ambush at the beginning " remains the most valid summation of the
second attack.

Understandably, in the United States the Vietnam War as a whole and
the Tonkin Gulf Incident in particular remain topics of widely ranging
interpretation and debate. McNamara recently visited Hanoi, where he
met with Communist Vietnamese Senior General Vo Nguyen Giap. McNamara
also invited the Vietnamese to participate in a conference of top
Vietnam War decision-makers to, according to press reports of the
visit, "correct the historical record." During his visit, Giap told
McNamara that "absolutely nothing" happened on August 4, 1964.
McNamara later endorsed this statement by his former adversary.

In his recent book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,
McNamara admits that the United States "may have provoked a North
Vietnamese response in the Tonkin Gulf," albeit innocently. He
maintains, however, that "charges of a cloak of deception surrounding
the Tonkin Gulf incident are unfounded. The idea that the Johnson
administration deliberately deceived Congress is fake." Many disagree.
Coincidentally, on the very day McNamara was in Hanoi, American
veterans, historians and scholars met in Washington, D.C., for a
conference sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Institute. One of the
conference's many prominent guest speakers was Daniel Ellsberg, the
former Johnson administration member who leaked the Pentagon Papers to
the press. In his presentation, Ellsberg addressed the question of
whether the Johnson administration deliberately misled Congress: "Did
McNamara lie to Congress in 1964? I can answer that question. Yes, he
did lie, and I knew it at the time. I was working for John
McNaughton....I was his special assistant. He was Assistant Secretary
of Defense for International Security Affairs. He knew McNamara had
lied. McNamara knew he had lied. He is still lying. [Former Secretary
of State Dean] Rusk and McNamara testified to Congress...prior to
their vote....Congress was being lied into...what was to be used as a
formal declaration of war. I knew that....I don't look back on that
situation with pride."

Ellsberg is not the only former government official of the era to
expose this alleged conspiracy. In 1977, former Under Secretary of
State George Ball claimed in an interview televised by the British
Broadcasting Corporation: "Many of the people associated with the
war...were looking for any excuse to initiate bombing. The DeSoto
Patrols were primarily for provocation....There was a feeling that if
the destroyer got into trouble, that would provide the provocation
needed."

Was this provocation needed to initiate bombing, or to assist the
Johnson administration during an election year? Either goal certainly
seems plausible.

Interestingly, a resolution stating, "Upon request of South Vietnam or
the Laotian government to use all measures including the commitment of
U.S. Armed Forces in their Defense"--the very resolution that became
the Tonkin Gulf Resolution--had been prepared in May 1964, three
months before the "unprovoked attacks" ever occurred. At the time,
Johnson was running his presidential campaign on a peace ticket.
Johnson's main opponent for the presidency, Senator Barry Goldwater,
was pushing for an even tougher U.S. stance in Southeast Asia. An
"unprovoked attack" by North Vietnam would give Johnson the
opportunity to respond with limited force and improve his image with
the American people without appearing to agree with his main political
opponent, a man the Johnson administration was busy painting as a
candidate who would potentially lead the country into a nuclear war.

If this line of thinking was part of Johnson's plan, it was
well-calculated. In response to the Tonkin Gulf attacks, the president
launched a limited airstrike and warned Hanoi against further
aggression. Thus, four months prior to the November election, he
appeared firm but not a warmonger. His approval rating with the
American people soared from 42 percent to 72 percent, and within three
months he overwhelmingly won his campaign for the presidency.

Tourison claims that the 34-Alpha raids and the DeSoto operations were
carefully orchestrated to solicit a North Vietnamese response in the
Gulf of Tonkin, a claim that appears at least plausible: "These facts
argue that if U.S. communications intelligence resources were able to
intercept these messages, Washington also would have known that Hanoi
had placed all its forces [on a] total war footing. Intercepted
passages would have revealed how closely Hanoi was monitoring the
raids undertaken by MACSOG's [MACV's Studies and Observations Group]
forces. Further, Washington would have known that Hanoi was closely
watching the obvious high correlation between other Seventh Fleet
electronic and communications intelligence activities in support of
Plan 34A and the full range of covert maritime, airborne, agent, and
psychological operations being conducted by MACSOG and the CIA.
Information about these actions, in spite of increased questions about
the widening war, was closely guarded by a select few in the executive
branch who had a need to know."

McNamara explains it differently: "Although some individuals knew of
both DeSoto and 34A operations and patrols, the approval process was
compartmentalized; few, if any, senior officials either planned or
followed in detail the operational schedules of both. We should have."

Tourison's position suggests quite the opposite, and testimony from
Daniel Ellsberg seems to back him up: "One of my first jobs in the
Defense Department was to carry around...the 30 day schedule,
regularly, of those operations starting in August [1964].... I carried
those plans to Alex Chowpin in the U.S. State Department...to McGeorge
Bundy...and they would initial it. They followed every aspect of it.
This is what then both Rusk and McNamara testified to Congress about
prior to their vote on a Tonkin Gulf Resolution that was to be used as
a declaration of war."

The result of whatever actually did or did not happen in the Tonkin
Gulf was that, by overwhelmingly approving the resolution, the U.S.
Congress ceded to the president the power that America's Founding
Fathers endowed only Congress--the power to declare war. According to
McNamara, herein lies the significance of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution:
"The fundamental issue of Tonkin Gulf involves not deception, but
rather, misuse of power bestowed by the resolution. The language of
the resolution plainly granted the powers the President subsequently
used and Congress understood the breadth of those powers....But no
doubt exists that Congress did not intend to authorize, without
further, full consultation, the expansion of U.S. forces in Vietnam
from 16,000 to 550,000 men, initiating large scale combat operations
with the risk of an expanded war with China and the Soviet Union, and
extending U.S. involvement in Vietnam for many years to come."

Despite passage of the War Powers Act in 1973, the question of
presidential versus congressional authority over U.S. military
operations remains a topic of serious contention. In 1990, McNamara
testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that no president
should be able to send American troops to war without congressional
approval. He further testified that he believed President George Bush
would seek congressional support before sending American troops to
conduct combat operations against Iraq. Bush did, and McNamara added,
"President Bush was right. President Johnson and those of us who
served with him were wrong."

For the Tonkin Gulf incident itself, McNamara endorses the hypothesis
of former Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs William
Bundy: "Miscalculation by both the U.S. and North Vietnam is, in the
end, at root of the best hindsight hypothesis on Hanoi's behavior. In
simple terms, it was a mistake for our administration, resolved to
keep the risks low, to have 34 Alpha operations and the destroyer
patrol take place even in the same time period. Rational minds could
not readily foresee that Hanoi might confuse them...but rational
minds' calculations should have taken into account the
irrational....Washington did not want an incident, and it seems that
Hanoi hadn't either. Yet, each misread the other, and the incidents
happened."

Daniel Ellsberg, at the November 1995 Vietnam Veterans Institute
Conference, was far more critical of those who served in the executive
branch and notably more apologetic: "What I did not reveal in the
Summer of 64...was a conspiracy to manipulate the public into a war
and to win an election through fraud...which had the exact horrible
consequences the founders of this country envisioned when they ruled
out, they thought as best they could, that an Executive Branch could
secretly decide the decisions of war and peace, without public debate
or vote of Congress....Senator Morse, one of the two people who voted
against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution told me in 1971, '...had you given
us all that information...seven years earlier, in 1964, the Tonkin
Gulf Resolution would never have gotten out of Committee. And, if it
had, it would never have passed....' But there was a time in my life
later...knowing the consequences of all these policies...when I did
say to myself that I'm never going to lie again with the justification
that someone has told me I have to....I've never been sorry I've
stopped doing that."

Now that time has passed and some of the individuals involved have
re-examined what happened, the shroud of controversy surrounding the
events of August 4, 1964, has begun to lift. As mentioned earlier, the
former secretary of defense endorses a joint effort with the Communist
Vietnamese to discuss and clear up some of the contentious areas of
the Vietnamese conflict. This effort may prove difficult and
ultimately fruitless unless the Vietnamese decide to be more candid.

Care must be taken with Communist Vietnamese versions of history. As a
typical totalitarian regime, Hanoi is acutely aware of how it is
perceived from abroad. The Communists monitor and often censor what is
said or written about them by their own citizens. This sort of
information-control policy helps to ensure that their "official"
accounts of history are accepted by their populace and go
unchallenged. They are quick to accept praise, warranted or not. And
they are even quicker to deny fault, deserved or not.

In one of their more current official histories, the Communist
Vietnamese claim responsibility for the initial attack in the Gulf of
Tonkin, but say that the second was an American fabrication to justify
airstrikes on August 5. In an older history, they not only claim the
second attack on August 4-5, 1964, but declare that date as their
navy's anniversary or "tradition day," proclaiming it the day "when
one of our torpedo squadrons chased the destroyer Maddox from our
coastal waters, our first victory over the U.S. Navy."

About this assertion, Douglas Pike, the foremost U.S. authority on the
People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), notes, "If the Gulf of Tonkin
Incident is a myth created by the Pentagon, as some revisionist
historians claim, the PAVN navy is now part of the conspiracy." In
this same history, the Communist Vietnamese claim that their navy sank
353 American naval vessels. It is rational to believe that the number
of U.S. Navy vessels lost to a fleet of Communist patrol boats, with a
total arsenal of 60 torpedoes, was somewhat less.

These and other indicators reveal that, to the Communist Vietnamese,
truth is simply a weapon. Given Hanoi's fondness for duplicity, we
begin to understand the task faced by intelligence professionals of
the Vietnam era--and by modern researchers, historians and former
government officials who, with as much as 30 years of hindsight, are
trying even today to unravel the events of that conflict. *

A U.S. Army military intelligence officer, Captain Ronnie Ford is the
author of Tet 68: Understanding the Surprise. Suggestions for further
reading: Secret Army, Secret War, by Sedgwick Tourison (Naval
Institute Press); Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War,
by Dr. Edwin Moise (University of North Carolina Press); and Vietnam
at War: The History 19461975, by Phillip B. Davidson (Oxford
University Press).